Security This Week: The Very Best Hacks From Black Hat and Defcon

All the best hacks from the year's biggest security conferences.

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As they do every year, hackers descended on Las Vegas this week to show off the many ways they can decimate the internet's security systems. Here's a collection of some of our favorite talks from this week's Black Hat conference, including some we didn't get the chance to cover in depth.

Leave it to hackers to turn the wholesome American institution of the carwash into a horrifying death trap. Security researchers Billy Rios and Jonathan Butts have offered a vivid new demonstration the consequences of connecting industrial equipment to the internet, hacking an automatic carwash to close its doors around a victim vehicle and repeatedly strike it with the system's robotic arm. They found that they could locate 150 of the carwashes publicly on the internet, guess their default usernames and passwords, and even disable a safety feature meant to prevent the carwash's equipment from touching a vehicle. They convinced one family carwash to let them test their attacks, but didn't actually try them on a vehicle to avoid causing damage to the arm. But they did create a kind of proof-of-concept video (below) showing the carwash door repeatedly slamming on the hood of their pickup truck.

In September of last year, security researchers at the Keen Labs group of the Chinese tech giant Tencent pulled off an impressive feat of automotive hacking, completely undermining the security of a Tesla S to disable its brakes after it automatically connected to their rogue Wi-Fi hotspot. Tesla responded with a batch of security fixes, and even added a new security measure to its vehicles known as codesigning, which requires that any code installed on the car's head unit be signed with an unforgeable key held only by Tesla. Now, less than a year later, the same hackers have struck again, this time finding a path into the Tesla X's innards that works via not just a Wifi connection, but via a cellular signal, vastly increasing its range. And after defeating Tesla's codesigning protection and installing their own firmware on the vehicle to take control of its brakes, they added a wonderfully unnecessary flourish, captured in the video below.

One group of hackers has modernized the old party trick of the woman singing a high pitched note at the perfect frequency to break a wine glass. With nothing but soundwaves emitted from a small "gun" device they created, they were able to vibrate the MEMS sensors that function as accelerometers and gyroscopes that stabilize everything from quadcopter drones to hoverboards to the image inside an Oculus Rift headset. By merely firing resonant sound waves at exactly the right frequency at those devices, the hackers say they could cause the hoverboard to tip, making the image inside the Oculus shake nauseatingly, and potentially knock a drone out of the sky. But the hackers, who work for Chinese e-commerce firm Alibaba, didn't exactly carry out all those dramatic attacks; They tested their drone hacking technique on a non-moving drone with its rotors removed for safety, and had to install the sonic emitter inside the hoverboard's case to make that attack work. But they argue those demos nonetheless prove their attack works, and could be made more powerful with larger, more expensive sonic equipment.

On Wednesday, FBI Cyber Division Unit Chief Tom Grasso gave a Black Hat audience details of the December Avalanche takedown orchestrated by a group of international law enforcement agencies. It took four years of work to eliminate the sophisticated online criminal infrastructure known as "Avalanche." The platform could act as a botnet, and was also used to power malware distribution, launch phishing attacks, and move stolen money. The initiative involved sinkholing more than 800,000 malicious domains, Grasso said, and in January 2016 when Avalanche administrators moved one of their private domain registration servers from Moldova to the US, officials got a search warrant and ultimately accessed administrator email addresses and a list of more than 200 clients.

Grasso particularly emphasized the crucial role of international cooperation in the operation. In addition to the necessity of law enforcement collaboration, the private sector also contributes to the FBI’s cyber crime work, offering everything from threat intelligence to technical help. In the case of Avalanche, numerous third parties including the Shadowserver Foundation and the German application research firm Fraunhofer contributed to the investigation. And Grasso made a plea for further assistance. “If you think you want to go out and take down a threat yourself but you’re like, ‘I don’t know if that would be legal,” we can make it legal for you to do that. We can take your good ideas and formulate them into a sound legal plan.”